Reasoning and Evolution
A high school student once asked me about the difference between deductive and inductive reasoning, and I explained that the second consists of going from particulars (this particular footprint), to the general (generally, when you see footprints they have been caused by someone walking). Syllogistic reasoning, the kind of reasoning which this illustrates, is basic. Why do most people seem unable to engage in it? Reasoning is an acquired process. It is one of several ways of knowing things through the five senses or by memory. It is either taught in school or by parents or by experience. You may learn it through the press of necessity. A battlefield soldier learns to reason because his life, and the lives of his friends, depends on it. As a lawyer, I learned that if you can't reason you lose cases.
Here is an example of the failure of reasoning, because both sides are guilty of it. I mean Darwin's Theory of Evolution (including certain variations of it. The Evolutionists and the Creationists scream at each other that they are right and the other side is wrong while neither one ever really knows what the Theory is, usually, or that before you can argue anything you must know what your premise is. if you are a biologists with all the necessary academic credentials you can argue science. But few people are in that position. About as far as most people can go is to pose questions which have not, so far as they can tell, been answered. It isn't that there are no answers, but if there are, what are they? For example, if an unassisted process of mutation and natural selection is the sole cause for man's existence in his present state, why did nature have to get so complicated? The simple botulism has been around longer than man and did not, to survive, require eyes, with their lens, cornea, retina, optic nerve, and brain just to mention the requirements for sight? And we could go through equally complex systems, such as the reproductive system. Why wasn't Nature content with the lowly botulism which survived without all that?
I do not mean to suggest that there is no answer to that and many other questions. But what is wrong with asking the question and why does that provoke insulting and sometimes hysterical reponses? Why are only "fundamentalist nut cases" accused of holding Creationist views? And where is the vaunted "missing link" that Evolutionists are so fond of? They once came up with a skull called the "Piltdown Man", which made them so happy until it proved to be a fraud. Otherwise, they have struck out. Search the world over; you probably won't find a "missing link" or, if you do, the ball will be in the Creationist's court on that issue.
But here is the denouement. What the parties to this hypothetical argument are really debating is whether there is a God who created the Universe, including man. It is in fact a religious argument, typically engaged in by people who do not know the first thing about the science implicit in the question, if there even is any science. So why don't they face the real question? Because there is some silly social taboo against discussing religion and politics in polite society, even though they are two subjects very much worth discussing.
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